------- Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine ------- Vol 2, Issue 17 As I write this, Lisa and I have begun preparing for an extended weekend with Kaylie down in Atlanta, Georgia. We're heading to the Dragon*Con Science Fiction convention -- nerd central this time of year. It will be Kaylie's first convention, so you know we'll be taking a lot of pictures and video. When we get home that will all be going up on her website. As I mentioned in the last issue, Lisa and I have been working on a website for our daughter, Kaylie. The goal for the site is to keep friends and relatives -- especially those who don't live in the area -- up to date on all the happenings in our daughter's live. Now it's possible that you'll never have the desire to work on a project like this yourself. You might even think this is a little too cute for you -- a website for a baby. Nonetheless, I thought I would share with you some of the tools we've been using to build and maintain the site. Because you do really need to get busy setting up that website about your cat, right? ---------------------------------------------------------------- In This Issue... ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Article: Applying the Tools, Part 2 2. Shameless Self-Promotion 3. The Fine Print ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Article: Applying the Tools, Part 2 ---------------------------------------------------------------- In the last issue I wrote about creating a website for my darling daughter. I touched on using a website template to create the look and feel of the site and then how we used Picasa and Picasa Web Albums to set up a series of monthly photo albums. From what I hear, the relatives are enjoying what they've seen so far. This time I'll talk a little about video and blogs. 1. For video, we decided to use the most popular video upload service on the planet, YouTube (http://youtube.com/). It supports most of the popular video formats (AVI, MPG, MOV, and WMV), so you can almost upload your precious videos directly from your camera to the net. For editing, I've been using Windows Movie Maker (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx). It pretty much does what you need it to do with no muss no fuss. It's a convenient and free way to edit, use visual effects, and add credits to your masterpiece before uploading them to YouTube. Once the video is available, you can embed it in a webpage. Similar to the method I described in the Picasa Web Albums, you just have to specify what you want the view to look like, and then copy the resulting HTML code into your web page. 2. To tell the daily stories of what's going on in Kaylie's life, we decided to add a blog. Blogger has been my tool of choice in the past (http://blogger.com/), so we decided to stick with it. Both Lisa and I are listed as authors on the blog (though she has been doing pretty much all of the work on it). We post short snippets and pictures in Kaylie's "voice". Yes, I know that it's a bit too cute, but you're going to do the same thing with your cat's website, so just leave me be. Now, one note: We could just have used Blogger (or another blogging service) to create the website itself, instead of creating a completely different site. It has a fairly sophisticated and easy to use interface to customize the look and feel. It's also pretty easy to add new gadgets and widgets such as the videos and photo albums I've already mentioned. The main reason we decided to go with a traditional site is that it gives us a little more control over the structure and look of the site, and I have the programming experience to make use of that flexibility. Your mileage may vary. 3. RSS, Part 1. Of course, having a blog is all well and good, but we needed some way to show the blog (or at least the headlines) on the main website. To get this to work, I made use of the RSS feed for the blog. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The idea is that people use a special application called a feed reader to subscribe to an RSS feed. From that point on, they are automatically notified when something new happens with that blog or website. For those who are particularly technical, yes, I know that Blogger uses an Atom feed instead of RSS. For the purposes of this discussion, though, they are basically the same. Some time ago I downloaded a program called AtomReader. It basically took one of these blog feeds and displayed the headlines so that it could be embedded in a website. I needed it to be much more powerful than it was, so I rewrote it. Now it generates not only the headlines which are in the right side "News" area, but it also can display the entire content of the most recent three posts in the blog. You can see it in action at: http://kaylie.cyberdatasolutionsllc.com/blog.php If you would like a copy of this RSS display script, I would be glad to send it to you. Just drop me a line at gpeters@cyberdatasolutionsllc.com. Fair warning, it is pretty bare bones, so if you don't have some experience customizing your website, not to mention a smattering of skill with the PHP programming language, it may not be of much service to you. I think that's all I meant to cover this issue. Next time I'll talk about more fun with RSS feeds and how we are tracking who all is looking at our site. See you in a couple of weeks! Copyright 2008, Greg Peters ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Shameless Self-Promotion ---------------------------------------------------------------- The "Clearing Up the Confusion" E-Zine is a production of Greg Peters, owner, chief cook, and bottlewasher of Cyber Data Solutions. CDS has been helping website designers develop better web presence for their clients for more than a decade. Visit us on the Web at www.cyberdatasolns.com to see how we can help your webmaster. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 3. The Fine Print ---------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: You can subscribe to the "Clearing Up The Confusion" E-zine at: http://www.cyberdatasolns.com/ezine Questions: If you have any questions, concerns or comments regarding the Clearing Up the Confusion E-zine, please email Greg Peters at: gpeters@cyberdatasolns.com This content may be forwarded in full, with copyright and contact information intact, without specific permission, when used only in a not for-profit format. 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